


Falling Into Balance

by Merixcil



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, i luv lightsabre fights, lightsabre fights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 02:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5895316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ben and Rey try out each other's lightsabres </p><p>(aka, I am obsessed with the difference in quality between Rey and Ben's lightsabres)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falling Into Balance

**Author's Note:**

> Set in a post-canon verse where Ben goes lightside and resumes training with Luke and Rey. 
> 
> Also Ben Organa. Not Solo. Organa.

For a moment, Ben can’t quite believe his luck. His thumb traces the ridges of the metal handle, worn and chipped with more years’ use than it was ever designed to bear; his eyes darting nervously from the button that will ignite the plasma to the tip. After all this time, and everything that’s happened, it doesn’t seem possible that he’s finally holding Anakin Skywalker’s lightsabre. 

“Go on then!” Rey grins at him. She’s sat cross-legged a way off, taking a well-earned break from Master Luke’s punishing training regime. Today especially, the old Jedi seems determined to run them ragged, insisting that they dedicate every hour of sunlight to sparring practice before meeting up with him back at camp. It wouldn’t be so bad, except they’re still expected to meditate for two hours before bed, and at some point they’re going to have to eat. 

Rey’s used to hard work and next to no food, Ben finds it harder to stay focused. He can feel the excitement radiating off her though; she’s desperate to see how he fares with her weapon.

“We should wait for Master Luke,” Ben says, rather more gruffly than he had intended.

A frown flashes across Rey’s face and in all of an instant, she projects a frustration that has been building for months. Ben will never just _do_ anything. He’s so slow to rally the Force, so hesitant when he draws his lightsabre.

 _Hurry up_ , she snaps in his mind. 

Ben scowls, takes a deep breath, and doesn’t rise to her challenge. _Be mindful of your feelings_ , he replies. And he only feels a little smug when she reluctantly concedes that he’s right. 

The fact of the matter is, Ben has seen the Force through the eyes of the Dark side for too long. The First Order may be gone, his remnant reverence for Darth Vader beaten down and thrown into the harsh light of context, but that doesn’t stop the Dark being the first place he looks to when it comes time to use the Force. It takes him a moment, or a minute in some cases, to redirect his energies to where he wants them to spring from. 

Ben suspects he will always be a shade too slow. A burning, fiery frustration wells up from the Dark pits he tries so hard to dissociate himself from when he thinks about it for too long. He meditates long into the night, and tries not to trouble Rey with it.

She catches his mind wandering, and with a lightness of foot that can only be attributed to a lifetime spent tiptoeing over quicksand and along the burned out wires of Star Destroyers, she’s at his side in an instant. 

“Here,” she says, wrapping her small hands around Ben’s where he holds the lightsabre. She takes his thumb and forcefully pushes it onto the switch, “all you have to do is squeeze.”

Ben squeezes. The instant his thumb hits the switch he sees a flash of red behind his eyes, the fires of a volcano, and some hideous, half dead thing writhing in the flames. He feels his knees threaten to buckle beneath him and his grip slipping on the handle of the lightsabre. 

Rey catches him round the waist before his stumble can turn into a fall. After everything they’ve been through, he’s still surprised at how strong she is, and as her fingers find purchase on his hip, the blue of the blade swims into vision. 

“I’m sorry…I don’t-“

“It’s fine,” Rey cuts him off, “it’s ok. I felt it too.”

Taking a deep breath, Ben steps out of Rey’s grip and turns his attention to the weapon in his hands. He has virtually no experience with any lightsabre but his own, save a few scant memories of being allowed to use Master Luke’s when he was very young. He doesn’t need experience though, it’s obvious that this blade is a masterpiece of plasma and Kaiburr crystals, woven so thick into the Force that it is as much a living, breathing part of it as anything. It appears to be weightless and without borders, detectable only because he can tap into that unquantifiable energy holding the universe in balance. 

He can feel Rey looking on, concerned at the sudden wave of peace washing through his aura, “you better not be shutting me out!”

“I’m fine,” Ben replies. Only ‘fine’ doesn’t begin to describe the wondrous harmony he feels with the lightsabre. He reaches out to her through the Force and lets his feelings flow through her, lets the beginnings of a smile tease the corners of his mouth. 

Rey laughs, not mocking or sarcastic laughter, but the kind of laugh she saves for when she’s wowed by the sheer existence of the universe. “That’s what a lightsabre’s supposed to feel like.”

It feels entirely unlike his own lightsabre. Ben tries a couple of experimental swipes through the air around him, crude by the standards Master Luke expects them to fight at, but they feel so graceful. The plasma doesn’t resist the air pressure or fight physics, it doesn’t jerk in his hand at the last moment – it sings in tune with his body and melts into the Force around him, till it feels like an extension of himself. 

“This is incredible,” he gasps, after throwing his shoulder into a spinning slash and, unfamiliar with the ease of movement Anakin’s blade affords him, turns two hundred and seventy degrees further than he was anticipating. 

“You look like a fresh trainee,” Rey giggles, sending Ben a mental image of himself twirling wildly as the lightsabre turns into a blue blur around him. He returns to her a pocket of resentment that she would laugh at him like that, but neither of them take it very seriously.

It does mean that when Rey asks to try his lightsabre, Ben doesn’t hesitate for a second.

“Go easy,” he warns, “it’s a little difference from yours.” 

As with almost all of her training, Rey is rational and self-assured, “how hard can it be?” she shrugs, reaching out to catch the black handle of Ben’s lightsabre when he throws it over to her. She holds it up to eye level, like she’s inspecting it for dents, and once satisfied that everything is in order, she brandishes it in front of her and flicks the switch to set the fire. 

The first thing that becomes obvious, is that she had not factored in the heat from the cross blade. Ben feels alarm run sharp through her mind as Rey scrambles to adjust her grip before she drops the weapon, but even as he steps forward to help her out, he knows she’ll be fine.

The second thing he notices, is that she is completely unprepared for how the blade moves – he can’t say he’s surprised. Rey attempts to pull the lightsabre above her head, but it twists and jumps in her hands, moves too fast one moment then doubles up, stopping still in the air the next. The jagged plasma gushing from the cracked Kaiburr crystal within flares and roars at odd moments, and despite her best efforts, Ben can feel her growing wary and distrustful of it. 

“When I was young, my father told me that you couldn’t ever count on a Wookie to do what you told them to. But if you didn’t talk to them like you were in charge, you’d already lost,” Ben says. Turning the blue blade of Anakin’s lightsabre off and clipping the handle to his belt. 

Rey shoots him a withering look, still wrestling with his lightsabre, “what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve got to treat that ‘sabre like it’s a Wookie. Talk to it like you’re in charge, if you can’t make yourself believe you have the upper hand, then why should it?”

“But it’s not…it’s…” Rey’s face screws up in concentration, resolving into disappointment as she loses all control of the weapon and the tip of the blade hits the floor in a shower of angry red sparks, “it’s not supposed to fight me like this.”

Ben shakes his head and taps the handle of Anakin’s lightsabre pointedly, “ _this_ lightsabre isn’t supposed to fight you. My lightsabre was only made to fight, that’s all it does.”

He holds out his hand and waits for Rey to pass the misbehaving lightsabre back to him. He can feel she’s not happy about her failure to produce so much as a clean swing from it, and is very sure that it won’t be the last time she tries to wield the red blade. 

Back in its owner’s hands, Ben’s lightsabre burns brighter and harder, extending itself with such speed that Rey almost doesn’t duck out of the way in time. 

“That thing is seriously screwed up,” she grumbles, sneaking into Ben’s personal space and retrieving her own weapon without so much as a by-your-leave. 

It _is_ screwed up. Ben rather thinks that that’s the point. There’s no harmony between him and this monstrous mass of crackling red, none of the ease with which he connected to the blue lightsabre. Even with the many years he’s had to perfect his mastery of it, it’s still an effort to stop the shuddering of the hilt showing in his arms, but picking this thing up was never meant to be easy. 

Ben Organa made this lightsabre when he was fourteen years old, then he drove it through the bellies of a dozen children. When he was done, he wasn’t Ben Organa any more. His is a weapon of mass murder and war, something to instil fear in his enemies and a terrifying rage in the wielder. He knows how to use it, and more importantly, how to use it for good, but when he feels the fight it puts up against his every whim he takes comfort in the fact that he doesn’t let this thing control him. 

He raises the blade above his head, whirling it through the air in a series of complex patterns that have taken him years to master, all in order to build up enough momentum in the face of such astonishing resistance from the lightsabre that a forceful attack can be made.

When his lightsabre comes down, Rey’s is there to meet it. She grins at him over the top of their interlocked blades, her features cast in red and blue shadows. He slips into her consciousness and stares back at himself, the way that the red gash which mars his face is almost invisible in the light of her ‘sabre. 

Ben feels harmony between Jedi and lightsabre, the sort of careful balance that can only be reached when the wielder no longer sees the thing in their hands as just a weapon. Not for the first time, he doubts he’ll ever find the balance or the internal peace to truly call himself a Jedi. 

_You’re doing fine for now_ , Rey’s voice echoes in his head. She twists her grip and pushes hard against him, with her body and with the Force. Her very spirit seems to be laughing with joy at being joined with her lightsabre, with the ground beneath her feet, with him, with everything. 

He takes a step back and she uses the opening to dart around him, swinging fast and free. Ben’s cuts and parries always come a second later than he’d like, but he’s got more variables to account for than she has. He has to sidestep the Dark side, draw from the Light, find his inner focus, talk to the Wookie like he’s in charge, and throw enough of his weight behind the blade to make it clear he means it. 

All Rey ever had to do was close her eyes and feel the Force.

“Last one standing digs the latrine next time we move camp,” Rey shrieks with glee, dancing at the edge of Ben’s reach. 

Ben allows himself a small smile when he nods in ascension, then charges right at her, feeling their twin energies pull and push against each other in equal measure. No matter how easily she wriggles and ducks out of his way, he feels sure it will be a fair fight.

**Author's Note:**

> You should come talk to me on [tumblr](http://kim--hanbins.tumblr.com/) sometime!! I need more Star Wars buddies...


End file.
